Ep. 144: Why I Created Joyous Justice — And Why Joy Is Not Frivolous

Ep. 144: Why I Created Joyous Justice — And Why Joy Is Not Frivolous

After a multi-year metamorphosis process and deep Afro-Indigenous coming-home work, Kohenet April Nicole Baskin returns to the podcast to more clearly articulate the deeper vision underneath Joyous Justice.

In this powerful relaunch episode, April explores why joy is not frivolous, why true joy requires metabolization, and why critique alone cannot build futures.

This conversation weaves together:

• collective liberation
• emotional and energetic agility
• systemic oppression
• rehumanization
• strategic possibility
• spiritual leadership
• grounded power
• and the importance of building futures larger than fear.

April shares why she created Joyous Justice as a “generative agitation and strategic intervention,” how oppressive systems condition us away from our humanity, and why reclaiming our full humanity may be one of the most important forms of resistance and collective power available to us.

If you’ve been searching for a more grounded, emotionally honest, spiritually rooted, and strategically hopeful approach to leadership and liberation work, this episode is for you.

Topics include:

• Why “joy” is often misunderstood
• Emotional metabolization vs toxic positivity
• Why constriction alone cannot build futures
• The GPS metaphor for liberation work
• Rehumanization and collective liberation
• Emotional agility and resilience
• Afro-Indigenous coming-home work
• Spiritual integration and leadership
• Building sustainable movements without burnout

Subscribe to the podcast and join the Joyous Justice Weekly email list to continue the journey.

If you’d like to go deeper into some of the themes explored in this episode, here are a few earlier conversations from the Joyous Justice podcast:

✨ Ep. 114: What is Joyous Justice really? 

✨ Ep. 121: Silly Rabbit, Joy is for Grown-Ups!

✨ Ep. 122: Silly Rabbit, Joy is for Grown-Ups! (Part 2)

✨ Ep. 78 / Ep. 10: Feeling Rage, Finding Joy

Transcript

Kohenet April N. Baskin (00:00)
Joy is what becomes possible when we face reality honestly without surrendering our humanity.

You're listening to the Joyous Justice podcast with award-winning social justice leader and coach, Kohenet April Nicole Baskin. Let's journey into the realms of love and liberation together, dissolving internal barriers and deconstructing systemic oppression from the inside out. Whether you're leading change in an organization or your own life, your next step to advancing joyous justice starts here.

Osiyo (Cherokee / Tsalagi) shalom. Hello. Konnichiwa. Salam aleikum. My beloved friends, new and old. It is a joy to be rejoining you on the podcast. This is something that I've been wanting to do for a while now and thank goodness. Thank Goddess. Thank God. I am well enough and clear enough.

to do it. So it's just wonderful to be here with you. in a bit of a gentle relaunch of Joyous Justice. Joyous Justice has been in existence now for almost 10 years. Not quite, but moving toward that.

Over that time, I've been very clear since I started and launched Joyce Justice of the, more so than I realized, bold and ambitious and chutzpahdik vision I had for it. And it's just now eight years in that I have engaged sufficiently in a multi-step, multi-year, multi-continental

metamorphosis process that I am now knock on wood. I'm pretty sure.

like 20 stages, y'all. I'm pretty sure I'm on the other side of it. Obviously, my evolution will be ongoing, but I feel like there has been a significant milestone and portal that I have passed through recently in the past few months, and it feels like things are really coming together.

So as I continue to step into this new era of my living leadership and joyous justices blooming and actualization, I want to articulate and explain the deeper vision underneath joyous justice, hopefully more clearly than I ever have before.

because I am now truly and significantly deeper into on the other side of slash more deeply embodied in my lived experience of being on the other side of a significant body of Afro indigenous coming homework that I've been engaging in and have undertaken since 2018, since shortly after.

I embarked on launching for shortly before and or after I decided to embark on launching Joyous Justice. It's wild to me. I think I've said this before, but it's saying again that I was so clear in my vision for Joyous Justice when I launched it and somehow I missed that there was a huge part of me, a huge part of that vision.

was just in my inner world and I'd been closeted about it for nearly 20 years and that it was going to involve a lot of work in order to actually share that vision with the world and have it be embodied and integrated throughout joyous justice. But okay. It's been.

Quite the journey, but I am here now, Hineni. I have arrived, Mangini (Wolof).

April, Nicole Baskin, Aviva Raquefet, Agaliska, and for those who are unclear, that was my American English name, my Hebrew name, and my Cherokee name.

is here and ready to fully actualize and stand 10 toes down in what joyous justice is all about. Was that enough of an intro? I think so.

So let's dive in.

Y'all actually before I do one more thing, which is that I don't just to be clear, um, because I was so closeted before I endeavored to explain and share joyous justice with the world, but it was hard for me to do it because I had so much ancestral trauma and internalized terror being the member of three different groups that have target been targeted for destruction and going through the us or schooling system.

where fundamental parts of my intuition, knowing, feeling, and being, and my neuro-atypicalness were highly, highly suppressed. And so there have just been layers of removing and working through and steadily releasing the internalizations of ableism, of racism, specifically anti-Indigenous racism,

and genocide, well as anti-black racism, internalized anti-Semitism, and their deep tendrils. And to be clear, again, of course, that work is not done, but I've moved a substantial amount enough that just in the last week, I was able to see more clearly for the first time that it's not only those dynamics, but the ways that they truly compounded.

in the last week, I've been specifically thinking about repeatedly. I have been an enrolled tribal member for 20 years, for 20 years now. And I don't think it was just the anti-Indigenous racism this whole time. I think that was exacerbated by anti-black racism that made it very confusing and hard for me to fully own and mindfully.

own and embrace the fullness of my identity. All right, y'all, was that enough of a preamble for those who are familiar with this podcast? You know I like the preambles. Joyous Justice is not just a name. I think some of y'all know that, but I really want to dive in here and make this crystal clear, especially for those who are newer to this ecosystem now and in the months.

and weeks and years ahead. It's a philosophy, a liberatory leadership ecosystem and a commitment. Joyous Justice is not just a name. And I think a lot of people hear the word joy and misunderstand what I mean in the context of Joyous Justice. think people think I mean happy justice, content and satisfied justice. And while it's

Not, not that. It's in simple, more everyday terms, it's not really about that. It's about the idea to cut to the chase that joy is power. People often think of joy as frivolous and light and innocent. I have that more of that association with happy, which I think can be a range of things. think ⁓ there's a lot of happiness and wisdom and deep spirituality as

Sufis have embodied and modeled for us for a very long time. But when I think of joy in the context of joyous justice, and as a number of authors from different angles who have written about joy in recent years, shout out to y'all so good. Joy is in this context has a deeper meaning. It's about true, deep, real and rewarding joy that's

rooted in, ideally, this is where we started to go even deeper, in energetic metabolism, in effective energetic metabolization.

Because you can't access joy by pretending things are fine. That's not joy, as we know, that's emotional and spiritual bypassing. That ain't what we're talking about here. We begin to access joy and more joy and be able to access it with agility and precision and intention when we build, when we establish and cultivate and strengthen our capacity to metabolize.

grief, despair, horror, terror, fear, and other big, difficult, and painful feelings.

Joy, as I understand it, as I just said, is not bypassing. It is not denial. Joy is not analogous or part of positivity or good vibes only culture.

To me, joy is about what becomes possible for me in the context of my work in Joyous Justice and from the indigenous black spiritual and spiritual teachers I've learned from many walks of life. Joy is what becomes possible when we face reality honestly without surrendering our humanity. I've explored this more in earlier episodes.

I'll link those in the show notes. There's much more to say here and I look forward to unpacking it in hopefully many more episodes to come on the show.

But when I'm saying the joy and joyous justice, it's a code word for emotional agility, for energetic sovereignty and co-creation, intentional co-creation.

It's reclaiming our pacing and our greater capacity to decide the lived and embodied experience to take greater ownership. We live in a world where there's so many dynamic forces externally and internally. We live in bodies that navigate all kinds of experiences. And I believe much more so than many people realize, not from a shame-based place, but from ⁓ empowerment and

from a perspective that is rooted in a desire for re-indigenization and re-humanization. And again, we can talk about this more later, but in the context of capitalism and various forms of systemic oppression, I believe over generations, people have been continually conditioned to dissociate from their inherent human experience and their humanity. And part of the work that many folks are doing, including here at Joyous Justice,

is to help us connect back to our innate humanity in all its beauty and delicacy and flaws and also in all of its innate raw power. So more on this soon. So it's not that I haven't on this podcast before talked about

not just being a childlike thing and having different purposes, but in this episode, I really want you to hear when I'm talking about joy, it's a code, it's a signal, it's pointing to a bigger concept of

What is it going to take for us to advance justice in the long run and now? And for me, fundamentally, ideally with any goal and especially one as important as collective liberation, social justice, but not just social justice, collective liberation, moving toward that future reality that is possible for us. If a sufficient enough of us can heal and access our immense power,

As many of us know, we have enough resources on this planet for everyone to live comfortably and safely. Things are becoming increasingly dire, but we still have access to our will and our capacity to choose as our beloved Victor Frankl.

brilliantly and beautifully and poignantly articulated in his book, Man's Search for Meaning.

Joy and Joyous Justice more broadly is designed to be an extremely intentional and potent, leveraged intervention in service to advance collective liberation. At no point or ever will I say the Joyous Justice ethos, which I want to again, in beginning in this episode and going forward throughout the podcast and

the other materials and resources and content I produce to help build out and enliven this vision so that you can see it more clearly. And it's not that this is the only or sole vision, obviously, that's boring and dominant and reductive. But I do believe that it is a key and helpful and powerful element of this work that I believe can resonate with many and truly support us

in advancing justice in some ways that we expect, but in a lot of ways that we don't, but that are inherently more humanizing. Not just relieving though, at times I try to market it that way so that maybe it's palatable, but that really helps us shed things that aren't serving us anymore and anchor back into our natural humanity and have a chance to

mindfully and strategically in a variety of ways work through what has kept us from accessing our full power. And I want to talk about more of that in this episode. So let me continue on with some points I wanted to make. So if you haven't already picked up on it from what I've said thus far, I think of joyous justice as a strategic intervention. And I also think of it as a loving, generative agitation

I wanted the phrase itself to interrupt something. Also, if you did or didn't notice, you will, the longer in my orbit. I tend to love alliteration. think it's something, a love I developed, one, maybe because it's just human, and also as a kid who had learning disabilities, alliteration was one of the tools or mnemonics I used that helped me remember things that were harder for me to remember.

So I wanted it to be both memorable with the alliteration and also to interrupt things. saw throughout my 20 years of activism and leadership that there were many people who genuinely wanted to build a better world and had very little access to joy, groundedness, embodied expansion, and strategic possibility.

even as they were leading very effectively, there were significant limitations that weren't their fault, but that were the result of the ways that systemic oppression had conditioned them and ways that even to this day, most people haven't been taught to be aware of and to also know that they have the capacity and power, particularly in relationship and with support, to move and transform so they can access more of their power.

so that they can access, have greater access to even more love and build their capacity to cultivate wisdom with time and practice. And with time and practice, I don't mean a lot of time, but in time with regular practice so that you don't just have that skill, but you build your capacity.

to increase your capacity for navigating more stress more effectively, but also to hold more love and to be able to, as you want to, voluntarily, intentionally, cultivate wisdom to access greater passion, imagination, collaboration. When I say joy, another element of it is about capacity. And as I understand energetics, joy is on a similar plane as love.

and passion and wisdom and appreciation. So if any of those words work better for you, they're not as alliterative, you could think of it as wise justice, as passionate justice, as knowledgeable justice, as loving justice. That is what is encapsulated in joy for me because in order to be able to experience joy without that doubt and those different pieces of more mature

Elder seasoned joy is one that has knowledge and has roots.

and comes from someone ideally who has access to the full range of their and increasingly collaborative and shared power.

constriction alone cannot build futures. And in our world today, I mean, in some ways that sounds obvious when I say it, but there's so much fragmentation that people aren't even aware of that's present in our contemporary society and engaging in these practices that help to cultivate joy or the capacity for joy appreciation.

I'm not saying that you have to be joyful all the time. Again, I think that's obvious, but that you have access to consistently, truly, not just in your head, but actually in your lived day-to-day experience, you have access to all of those different attributes I named before. ⁓ And I'm saying this to segue into the next piece I wanted to talk about, that in our contemporary world today, there's a lot of critique.

and resistance that we're engaging in. And that is important. I am partial for those things as well, but we are so focused on them often that I believe our strategies are lopsided and by having more balance in them, we gain more access to power. It's not just about balance though.

which is to say that.

I care deeply about ending systemic oppression, colonization, racism, harm, and other forms of racism and other forms of systemic intergenerational harm. And to cut to the chase, I believe that that's possible for us to achieve in our lifetime.

And if it's not quite possible to achieve, I'd rather endeavor to sustainably strategically try my darndest in collaboration and co-creation with other individuals until the day I die. That's my plan, y'all. And I'd love for whomever would like to join me or who's intrigued by this prospect to spend more time in the joyous justice orbit to join

the joyous Justice Weekly email.

to listen more to this podcast, to I'm going to be rolling out more entry level offers soon. Because now that I'm not internally navigating so much terror, I have more space to create now that that energy has been freed up. All right, so why all of this effort around joyous justice?

I care deeply about ending systemic oppression, colonization, and all of its various extensions, capitalism, racism, homophobia, and the longer list of various forms of systemic intergenerational harm, exploitation,

and destruction.

And this has been a enduring desire for me since I was a small child. I got to see firsthand as a toddler that some of the very best people in the world are not immune to state sanctioned violence and oppression. And then as I moved throughout my childhood, I learned more about the histories of the ways that

My peoples had been targeted for destruction. And so this is a central part of my heartbeat and my purpose in this world. And at the same time, I do not want this systemic dysfunction and dehumanization to be at the organizing center of my imagination and my heart, even as I carry part of this purpose in my heart.

the metaphor I've been using over the last month or so to help explain this, because often people say like, you know, I don't want to focus on the things I don't like. want to focus on what we want. And when I was a kid, especially, and even into young adulthood, that phrase was used typically by people who wanted to avoid facing hard things and working for systemic change. That's not what we're talking about here. I'm talking about this in a very pragmatic

as well as energetic and strategic sense. When you set your GPS, so this is how I've been describing it for a couple of months now. When you set your GPS, you do not set it to where you are running from or where you do not want to go. You set it toward where you want to go. And to be fair for a number of us, there's work we need to do to reclarify our vision. I don't know about y'all, but...

about eight, five to eight years ago, the vision and theory of change I had really got trampled on. And I've had to reassemble that theory of change and vision, which I have done and I'm in the midst of doing. And also it's taken an immense amount of ongoing release and healing and expression of the pain that I've experienced. So it's not for the faint of heart. It seems simple, but

there's some work that can at times be involved. Sometimes even in the midst of that pain, it's still clear where we want to go. And so it's important that we center this. And I believe, I'm not saying I'm anti-resistance or anti-fighting. I am up for the fight and I believe my life in many ways and I desire it for it to increasingly

have the effect of perpetually resisting systemic oppression. But I don't want that to fill my conscious mind. I want to center liberation and healing and joy and love and have the resistance and the impairing of systemic oppression to largely be an effect of that or

a result of that work.

And so to pick up on this point and draw it out a little bit more or surface more about it. I think it's worth saying that in my perception, I don't think anything is quite this black and white, but there was a significant and substantial and important and ongoing body of work that is necessary.

that was and is necessary to name and identify and understand how systemic oppression works. But my thing is, I don't think that's the final destination. And it's important for us to remember this. One of the things that I've talked about frequently behind my paywall that I want to start talking about more publicly among a lot of different things and just take my inner world and largely, but not entirely turn it outward. ⁓ There were different things about COVID and my coming homework.

that had me kind of nestled in. We frequently, for instance, and I'm excited to come back and there's a lot more I want to talk about in this regard, but we frequently talk about the four eyes of oppression and shout out to the movement leaders and intellectuals who created this framework, the four I's of oppression, ideological oppression, institutional, interpersonal, and individual slash internalized, especially internalized.

Heavy on the internalized, right? That's so helpful. And I have not heard anyone say, I'm sure there's some folks who maybe have. I haven't heard it, but in the context of joyous justice, I also like to talk about the four I's of repair, of love, of justice, of liberation, of healing. When we're talking about any issue, are we also looking at the four eyes of positive change, of greater accountability?

of the I's eyes of liberatory consciousness around a given issue. So this is frequently in our society, there's both fragmentation and like an either or thinking, and there's so much of the both and, and also nuancing of things. So I remember learning around the mid 2000s, hearing people talk about this idea of de-centering oppression, de-centering whiteness.

de-centering patriarchy in the context of sexism, which I didn't name earlier as one of the headliner oppressions. There are so many, it's hard to name some without naming them all. Sexism is, I believe, one of the core, core oppressions in our world today, among others, that really holds a lot of things in place.

So again, it's hard for me to just stop our transition here because there's so much more to say. But with the help of a wonderful new team member, Eunice, shout out to Eunice. I'm hopefully going to release this burden I've had of how do I talk about anything when there's so much to say and actually start saying all of the things and all of the analysis so that hopefully I can affirm and also supplement and resource y'all around developing

stronger, but also holistic and loving and robust and courageous and badass analysis that equips us for the fight that is now and the journey that is ahead, that is not for the faint of heart. But that doesn't mean that we have to harden. But what it does mean is that we need to get more strategic and invest in places that are important to invest in, like

reclaiming our innate human capacity for emotional and energetic agility, not bypassing, not toxic positivity, not papering over. And for me, the core piece, the core element or the core factor that helps to cultivate and maintain agility is also opportunities, sufficient opportunities for raw

honest, truth-telling, and emotional and energetic expression and moving and working with the energy. So, okay, before I go too far into the deep end with that, let's get back on track here.

So with our GPS, we don't set it to the place we never want to go again. We never want to be again. We want to be steadily and clearly keeping our North Star and our horizon of collective liberation and all the shared and individualized ways that we understand that that come and link together to form a radical, vibrant, visionary future. We want that to be where we're headed and have different milestones.

along the way. And I think in some ways that's obvious, but I think a lot of us have a lot of unmetabolized despair and discouragement and unhealed harm from our lives and from other lifetimes and from groups and peoples we are a part of. But we in a variety of different ways get to over time understand some core principles that are true across time, space, identity, context.

And leverage those, bring them in close, figure out what's the practice that is tailored to our needs and to begin to more effectively meet our needs individually, in partnership, in circles, in community and in movements and hopefully over time in societies. But we don't even need the full society as we know, in order to powerfully move things.

We just need leverage and strategic numbers of people. And that work is already underway. It's already underway. Y'all on various fronts, we are losing right now. But I have to tell you as someone who comes from multiple peoples who have lost a lot, there is still hope and there is something worth fighting for. And as someone who is frequently the underdog,

who's a child and grandchild of underdogs, underdogs can win. I know this terrain well. I'm a person who had learning disabilities as a kid and a lot of also trauma. What was learning disability versus trauma? I'm still parsing some of that out. I know what it means to be behind. Intimately well across identity, space, time.

with different identities, with different peoples and winning victory, progress, healing, not like a triumphant. We're not looking for the triumphant trophy of a win right now necessarily. Although I am looking for some of those in my lifetime still. I've not given up hope on that. We can really start to profoundly and strategically in coordination, move the dial.

And I launched Joyous Justice to ideally in my dream, help many, hopefully thousands of people do this. Give them the tools they need to work with energy in their mind and the resources around them more creatively and fluidly in service of our shared dreams.

So the question is, what are we building toward? And how do we, and some of us know this already in different ways. And if we don't, or what would we love to see? What would we love to see that would move us steadily toward collective liberation? How do we envision collective liberation will feel? I think a part of it will feel very joyful, which is why I want to center.

joy in the context of justice and liberation work now, because if that's the outcome we want, we sure as heck better start weaving it into our process right now. Right now.

because I believe it is our human and divine, if you're into that, I am, birthright. I believe it is our human birthright. I believe it is our divine birthright to have access to joy often, not all the time, but often. It is also an act of resistance, but I don't want to center that. I want to center the joy of my ancestors. I want to center

my Cherokee and potentially also Chickasaw and Choctaw ancestors who were on Turtle Island for thousands of years

ancestors who have been experiencing joy and life from a place of profound Thanksgiving and its original, not colonized and icky form of Thanksgiving and appreciation and interconnection and close relationship and collective and self actualization. That

has a much longer and more robust history than this crappy toxic disease of racialized capitalism, diseases of racialized capitalism, sexism, imperialism.

A number of us come from lineages that are very old and rich and deep. And I have chosen through doing my coming home work and beginning to steadily embody that more and more that work is ongoing to center that in my work, to center re-humanization.

as opposed to dehumanization, to interconnection. I want to be focusing on liberation. What would liberation look like around that context? How are we mitigating harm in that situation? I.e. how are we bringing love and resource into that context now? And what are we building towards? And how do we help to weave those things together? For some of us, this comes naturally. For others of us, this is a

learned and trained skill, but it's absolutely accessible to many of us. So I want to center rehumanization, interconnection, liberation, grounded power, purpose, possibility, wise, loving leadership, collective thriving. That's what I'm setting my GPS to. that's what those are some of the pieces that I want. Cherishing tradition.

as a part of the center, the locus of my day-to-day focus in my leadership and living. And I invite you to continue to broaden that in your own living and leadership and or consider the possibility of that.

Yeah, I know as I'm talking about all of this, you might be thinking we've got a lot of fucking work to do. And that is absolutely true. There is revamping and deconstructing and breaking down and burning, repairing, rebuilding, reimagining, transforming. There is a lot of work that we have ahead of us and many.

people, and so much so it can feel overwhelming and despairing and discouraging. And what I would say is likely the origins of that or those feelings might not be fully what they seem. And it is possible over time with resourcing and support that in the face of these things, we can experience appreciation, joy.

our shared humanity and connection. Because I do not want to regularly live in despair. I'll be honest with you. The past two years have been, last year was the hardest year of my adult life. And there was immense grief. And I continue to move through that. It's not that I'm dismissing this. This is significant. There is a tremendous amount to grieve.

And for those of us who have been much less conditioned than I have been to the absolute horror of how our society has been set up for the least for my life and the lives of my recent ancestors ⁓ and are newly aware of this. Yeah, there's a lot of grief and sorrow and pain and rage and heartbreak.

work through and if you're looking for contexts or a context or space in which to engage in that, I hope you know that the joyous justice community and the current circles I have and the collectives I will be adding into the mix are contexts in which you can presence.

that pain and actually also be given resources and tools to support you with that.

And it's important for us to do this and to face the unfacable together because once we do and as we do that, we get to have access to the truth of how mighty we are

We are mighty when we're resourced and especially when we lock arms as we're able to do so. So joyous justice is about increasing our capacity to move in agile and nimble ways in the service of collective liberation, not just in our leadership, but throughout our living to counter this fragmentation and to learn principles that cut across

the different facets of our lives and help us work with our thoughts and our energy in more skillful, inspired precise and strategic ways that many people, think most of my listenership are unaware is possible for them in this lifetime and totally is. You just need to be given access to insights and a space to

Let it percolate in your being and through the different layers of your being and let it take root.

because a number of the things I teach and talk about within grounded and growing and future offers that I'll be rolling out in the coming days and weeks, there's moments, at times there's a whole elements of what we cover in grounded and growing that really isn't covered anywhere else or with the integration that I offer covered. But then there's also other things that you might've heard before, but you

didn't get to experience the full expression of it and implications of it for your living and your inherent divinity and goodness and be able to apply that in practical and inspired, joyful, meaningful, aggressive, courageous, bold ways.

So I'm excited to share these insights and resources with you because we're, as we know, powerful when we engage in solidarity. Oh, that's what I was trying to start to say before and then I think I forgot, right? And then also support you around and each other around learning more advanced insights about how to work more effectively, perceive and work more effectively across lines of difference.

There's lots of talk today about, and tzures about the polarization. The polarization is a natural result of all of this chronic intergenerational segregation, fragmentation, breaking down, but your multiracial, intercultural, inter-spiritual sister is here to help counter that.

and to demystify what it takes for us to steadily counter those powerful wedges and dissolve them from the ground up.

So to draw this episode to a close, thank you for being on this journey with me and with us with the Joyous Justice team. Again, shout out to Eunice.

All of this to say, here's where I've landed in terms of the next stage for joyous justice as I'm finally now ready to stand in my power and my clarity that I am a, again, I might fine tune the language, but a guide of guides and a priestess. So meaning a guide of leaders, executives, people serving professionals, parents.

people whose living touches other lives in profound and lasting ways.

I'm no longer in hiding, which means, or in the closet about various facets of my identity. It's been humbling how much work it's taken as someone who has been explicitly in explicit professional and then in counter oppressive, liberatory healing spaces since the age of three or four for almost every year since then. So,

And I would estimate there were a couple of years where I wasn't engaged so far, over 35 years. So I'm saying this to give some context of the magnitude of what I'm saying.

Joyous justice is a liberatory leadership ecosystem. It is for kindhearted people who want to help build a dramatically better world without sacrificing themselves or the issues that matter most to them. Not through burnout, not through depletion,

Not by harsh self-criticism, Not through fragmentation or performative suffering.

Joyous Justice is a liberatory leadership ecosystem that helps support individuals and leaders in being more powerful in our natural innate humanity.

powerful in our relationships, in our courage, powerful in our imagination, in our radical imagination.

Powerful in our ability to repair and to heal. Powerful in our ability to build and co-create.

Joyous Justice is finally ready now that its founder and director is ready to step into being a guide of guides and an Afro-Indigenous Jewish priestess. Joyous Justice is a liberatory leadership ecosystem that supports leaders in cultivating their agility, reclaiming their full capacity and their full humanity.

in the context of systemic oppression.

So if it isn't already clear, we've got a lot of sacred, purposeful, harrowing, and also exquisite, triumphant work to do that I believe we are far more powerful than we have been taught to believe and that many of you listening still can even fully access right now.

we've got a lot of work to do and also please take comfort in hearing and knowing that I'm going to do my darnedest to back this up with lots of resources and content. That we are far more powerful than we have been conditioned and taught to believe. And some of us know this intellectually and especially feel it now given all of the alarming and horrific

incidents that have been unfolding increasingly over the past few years and in recent months. And there is still yet, I believe, more for you to discover around what's possible for you and us in this moment and moving forward. And we are worthy of having more access to pursuing and advancing these radical, radiant dreams of healing and collective liberation.

Joyous Justice is part of my contribution toward helping us remember that and enliven and embody that. If this resonates, I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast and join the Joyous Justice Weekly email list. It'd be great to see you there. I will link to the earlier episodes in the show notes for folks who want to go deeper into the themes around joy, grief,

rage, metabolization.

All right. So as I draw this episode to a close for now, more soon. And again, as a reminder,

if you want to go deeper into those or get a little bit more acquainted with some of the history and vibe that more established joyous justice community members

have previously become acquainted with, or if you are one of those folks and it's like, oh, let's get a refresher. Yeah. If this is in fact a generative agitation for you in the context of the suffering that's taking I invite you to check that out too. And, ah.

Divine willing, there is more coming soon and I am actively engaging in my, the core kavana I set last Rosh Hashanah of turning my very, very robust, at this point it's kind of like a universe, not just even a world anymore, inside out and

share a lot of this resource with more of y'all.

And I'm excited to see the magic and brilliance and courage we can weave and co-create together in service of collective liberation and our dreams. Much love and more soon. Bye for now.

Thanks for tuning in. To learn more about Joyous Justice LLC and how you can work with April, check out the info in the show notes or visit joyousjustice.com. If you enjoyed this episode, show some love. Subscribe or leave a comment wherever you're listening. Tell your people, share what you're learning, stay humble but not too humble, and keep going because the future is ours to co-create.